Harvey G. Alexander, who founded and served as executive director of the Baltimore Film Festival and also read poetry on WBJC-FM, died Nov. 23 of pulmonary edema at Franklin Square Medical Center.

He was 77.

"I first got to know him in 1964 at Martick's. They wouldn't let me in, but I got to know him behind Martick's back in the alley," said film director and writer John Waters.

"Harvey was an eccentric intellectual and a real bohemian, but always very friendly," said Mr. Waters. "He was a film fanatic."

"He was a Baltimore original," said Richard A. Macksey, a noted Baltimore book collector and professor of humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. "He had an enormous appetite for film, the theater and reading, and he loved sharing this with people. The arts were very important to him."

The son of a musician and an accountant, Harvey George Alexander was born and raised in East Baltimore. He attended Polytechnic Institute.

When he was in his junior year at Poly, he dropped out and joined the Norwegian merchant marine, explaining in a 1974 interview in The Baltimore Sun that he was driven out of school by such books as "Silas Marner."

At 17, he went on the high seas for "$35 a month and all the spaghetti and bacon you could eat for breakfast," he said. The ship had a good library, where he immersed himself in books in his free time.

After 31/2 years at sea, Mr. Alexander enrolled at St. John's College in Annapolis, where he earned a bachelor's degree and where his interest in film began. As head of the college's film society, he said in the 1974 interview, "I just screened every film I ever wanted to see."

Mr. Alexander, who taught writing at local schools, was a student of the late Elliott Coleman's writing seminar at Hopkins, where he earned a master's degree in writing in 1969.

He was head of his own film production company and was teaching film at the University of Baltimore when he founded the Baltimore Film Festival.

"It started very innocently," he said in The Sun interview, but with the university's tight budget, he found it difficult to get the films he wanted to screen for his students.

Mr. Alexander came up with the idea of a film festival that would feature a collection of good short films from independent filmmakers.

He turned to the American Film Institute in Washington, got permission to use their name and launched the Baltimore Film Festival in 1970.

The first year, the festival, which was held at the University of Baltimore's Langsdale Library, featured 47 films, six of them earning $50 prizes, with money he had raised himself.

An entrant in the 1970 festival came from Mr. Waters, then a fledgling filmmaker, whose "The Diane Linkletter Story" was screened.

The 1972 festival, held at Stephens Hall Auditorium at what is now Towson University, featured Mr. Waters' "Pink Flamingos."

"People who never came out of their closets came out," Mr. Alexander told The Evening Sun in 1973. "It took a month for Baltimore to realize 'Pink Flamingos' was the freak event of the year."

By 1973, the festival had expanded and featured 230 films, with some of them coming from as far away as Malta and Yugoslavia, with prize money totaling $1,500.